The Credit Crunch and The Insolvency Arena

The moves of our Federal Reserve and Treasury in the last few weeks are gigantic in scope. Decades from now students will study 2008 when the financial markets changed, when the relationship between the government and the private sector was forever altered, and when doggedly held beliefs were shaken from their established perches.

Of course unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures, but massive actions in complex systems always create unintended consequences. What will ours be? Can the brightest minds in the world fail? How can apparently simple solutions breed terrible consequences? Easy.

Take the building of the Panama Canal. The French found the brightest among them to engage in one of the most historic engineering events of the era. They tapped their countryman Count Fedinand de Lesseps who helped build the Suez Canal to oversee the project. They tapped Gustave Eiffel (as in the Eiffel tower) to build the locks for the canal. They tapped some of the best doctors of the day to care for the thousands of workmen on the job.

And so it began. The brightest and the best all working as a team. They built huge wards with rows of beds to take care of injured or sick workers. To keep the stinging bugs and tarantulas from crawling up the legs of the hospital beds onto the patients, the brilliant French doctors had a plan. They placed each bed leg in a bowl of water. The bugs would not crawl into the bowl and swim to the legs of the beds. The solution to the problem of dangerous bugs seemed simple, even ingenious.

But the rate of Yellow Fever and Malaria among the hospital patients was soaring. Even the rate of infection of the workers in the fields was soaring. Dozens died daily. Soon hundreds died daily. The problem kept compounding until finally, more than 20,000 workers died. The French gave up. The bonds used to finance the building of the canal project were worthless. Middle class families who invested in the bonds back home in France lost everything. The smartest people, from one of the most educated countries on earth at the time, failed miserably.

Turns out, it was the law of unintended consequences writ large in the Central American jungle. As we now know, mosquitoes breed in stagnant water and transmit tropical diseases through their bites. The bowls of water meant to keep crawling bugs from reaching the sleeping patients actually served as a breeding ground for mosquitoes. The French inadvertently created an epidemic that killed people at an appalling rate. Take infected people; place them in a ward with workers who might only be injured. Place hundreds of little mosquito homes at the foot of everyone’s bed. Make sure that all mosquitoes now will carry the diseases in their blood. Make sure all patients in the ward are infected. Send the legions of infected insects out into the fields to infect more workers. Fill more wards. More bowls. More dead.

The law of unintended consequences is very real. Hard walls in a complex system force the system to find a way around. When the Treasury asked (and received) permission to bail out Fannie and Freddie, they wanted the markets to feel good about lending them money, about buying their stock, and about buying their mortgage backed securities. Instead, just the suggestion of the bailout created a crisis of confidence. If the government takes over, will it render my stock worthless? Will it make my bonds junior in importance to their bonds? The move intended to avoid a bailout, forced a bailout.

Now the government intends to buy tens of thousands of bad loans and begin a massive program of debt forgiveness and loan restructuring. What will the unintended consequences be? Will good borrowers stop paying on their loans so they can get on the gravy train? What will the unintended consequences be of the government’s move to buy preferred shares of huge banks? Instead of encouraging the banks to lend again, the move might simply delay the inevitable pain and failure of bad banks. Perhaps it will not encourage lending at all – just a round of cannibalizing consolidation.

The markets into which the Fed and the Treasury are digging their fingernails are deep, complicated, and connected globally on the lowest and the highest levels. A complex system requires us to tread with caution, to think in terms of decades not hours. Can the brightest minds in the world make mistakes? They do all the time. In the case of Panama, they killed 22,000 people without pointing a gun. Can the best laid plans fail? Of course. As the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus observed a couple of thousand years ago, “things we not hope for often come to pass more than things we wish.”

With the speed of a thunderstorm and the force of a glacier, the massive deleveraging of global markets is reshaping the face of the American financial markets. The venerable system of Wall Street investment banks was carved from the map in a matter of weeks. The unwinding is not over of course. But a way forward must be found.

There will be a moment in the months and years to come, when our culture will look back and realize that it is over. That we survived a very black time and that better days are finally upon us. At that moment, without a doubt, we will have an entrepreneur to thank. An innovator. A free thinker. Teams of them in fact.

Some would argue that innovation got us into the mess in the first place. They cry out – It was the derivatives! The credit default swaps! It was those complicated and new fangled financial instruments that made all of this happen!! In a way they would be right. There is little doubt these financial innovations amplified risk to an astonishing degree rather than democratized risk as they claimed. But the answer is not so easy.

Deeper problems have been building for years. Our central bank was too cozy with our politicians and too archaic in its structure. Our affordable housing mandates were pushed too far and they injected poison into the financial bloodstream. Our energy policy was tumbling headlong into dangerous addictions. The price tag of our social aspirations outstripped the income of our tax system. Our national obsession with stuff eclipsed our cultural heritage of rugged individualism.

Not surprisingly, the creation of sophisticated financial instruments coincided with the maturation of computation. Financial wizards fed data and ran programs as fast as their processors could handle it. Currency arbitrage could be tracked and bet upon. Fluid commodity markets like oil and wheat could be understood in new and different ways. By the height of the credit bubble, Wall Street was selling a piece of a piece of a piece of a debt insured by someone who was insured by someone who owned a security. The math was unfathomable. Turns out the risk was unknowable and the damage unthinkable.

The innovations were not without benefit of course. The securitization of mortgages lowered borrowing costs for millions of people for decades. The explosion of building brought an explosion of jobs. Marketers had people to pay them. Brand builders had people to brand. Web designers had sites to build. There was money to fund the tech start ups. There were customers to buy computers and pay for internet access.

But the system was still the same. The innovations were just still the playthings of the old guard. Profits were maximized and risk was forgotten. But the bones of the system could not handle the new weight that was being created. Remember, the horse drawn buggy was improved with newer wheels, better axels, and better suspension right up until the automobile relegated it to history forever.

And so it comes to you. To us. The destructive force of unwinding is clearing out a new space upon which to build a new financial model. The task to us is to build nothing short of a new cultural identity. The architects of this new model have not yet revealed themselves. But make no mistake; the new model will be as different from the old as the car is from the buggy.

Eric Hoffer observed, ‘In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.’ The denizens of Wall Street and the tired politicians in Washington are beautifully equipped indeed. It is time for the learners to step forth.

The ferocity of the credit crisis has surprised everyone. Even the most pessimistic observers are a bit punch drunk that their dire prognostications are coming true. How did it happen so fast? When will the sheer speed and force of this unwinding begin to subside?

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe there is an analogue in physics. In the Wall Street Journal today, it was announced that 3 men have won the 2008 Nobel Prize in subatomic physics (they split a 1.4 prize by the way). Their accomplishments were in the prediction and discovery of something called ‘spontaneous broken symmetry.’

It seems that in any background field; magnetic, gravitational, or fluid for example, things might appear stable or symmetrical. Suddenly, with respect to the field, the symmetry is broken and things rapidly change. As folks peered deeper into the subatomic level of thing, these spontaneous breaks in symmetry were a complete surprise and revealed a great deal about the particles behind the particles.

A simple example of this symmetrical state devolving is often described as a ball sitting on the top of a hill. There is symmetry of the forces acting upon it, holding it there or not pulling it or pushing it in any direction. But it is not a stable position. Once the ball moves to roll down the hill, the symmetry of forces is broken. The ball chooses one path over all of the others, and the moment changes in a swift and dramatic fashion.

Our American economy has existed in a symmetrical state since the Great Depression. The ball has wobbled of course. It has been bumped and pushed and pulled by war, by the decoupling of the gold standard, by terrorism, by the technological revolution, and even by changes in healthcare. But seething and boiling and rolling beneath the apparent stasis of this symmetry, were the dramatic and powerful movements of the credit and banking system.

While charitable organizations told our corporations about their moral obligation to give, the corporations were in a position to give because the machinery of credit was working. While corporations bragged of their successes, the banking system was malleable enough and strong enough to provide a base on which to build. Marketers taught us about being sticky and finding our blue ocean ideas, while they feasted at the table of business profits. Politicians waxed philosophical and moralizing about our need to commit resources to social programs, all funded by the humming economic machine beneath their feat. The military paychecks we have written, the foreign aide checks we have written, the infrastructure improvement checks for highways and bridges we have written – all were cashed by the vast pool of economic prosperity managed and maintained by a functioning system of currency and credit.

And then there was a spontaneous breaking of symmetry. The forces acting, or not acting, on the ball perched at the top of the hill changed. The ball wobbled and then chose a course. We all stand surprised that we cannot stop it, that we have not been able to place it on its perch again.

But apparently, something fascinating happens at that spontaneous symmetry breaking. The researchers observed things about matter they had never seen. They identified at least three new families of quarks – building blocks of all things. In fact, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in their citation for the award; ”spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface.”

And so it is that we have a moment to observe. To learn. To see beneath the things that our nation has taken for granted for decades.

Symmetry will return of course. The ball will find a new spot atop some other hill. Our economic model will follow the same fundamentals but in an entirely different way. For a moment, inside the perilous movements of this credit crisis, the clever and resourceful will observe and learn a bit more about the concealed nature of order under the apparently jumbled surface that has been our economy for years.